Bye Bye
My Internet Superhero

We
hardly Knew Ye

The Internet
is now on my top ten list of things that soon has to go out of my life, along
with bad Jay Leno monologues and
artery clogging Crispy Cremes. On a daily, nah, make that hourly basis, the
Net brings me spam, viruses, snoop programs that want to watch everything
I type, and oh yeah, porn, lots of porn. Don't get me wrong porn lovers,
but how many offers of Free Barnyard Sex! can you handle in a day? Even Ferdinand
the Bull would be wasted.

It wasn't
supposed to be this way. The Internet was the poster child of the 90's,
promising fame, fortune, truth, beauty and the end of oppressive regimes
worldwide. If there were a problem anywhere on the planet, the miraculous
Net would fix it. Global hunger? Here, have a byte of a Happy Meal. Disease?
Gone in the flash of a blinking modem. Poverty? Wiped out with E-cash. The
Net
was the electronic incarnation of the ultimate superhero.

But then came
the dot com bust, the great 401K meltdown and all the rest of the bad news,
and the Net now looks more like a defeated and once
cocky boy
wonder,
rooting about for a bandwidth handout in the digital back alley dumpsters.
And there are lots of low life vermin who have no problem with helping this
poor
sad sod get another foul drink from the garbage-choked T3 pipes.

All out
range war has consequently broken out between the no-guilt-gene
junk mail spammers and the Net vigilantes who are self-righteously determined
to clean up virtual Dodge City and its teeming hucksters, licentious libertines,
and bunko artists. The
e-bullets are flying
so thick in this spam corral shootout the friendly fire is as bad as the
bad guys' incoming.

Did you know
Yahoo is on a spammer blacklist? In the anti-spammer's
bit-bible thumping zeal to root out and crush Internet evil, almost anyone
can end up on the wrong side of this net gang who couldn't shoot
straight. E-mail from your mom may be blocked from reaching you because
the originating
system has a unique IP address identical to one that has been blacklisted
as being a source of hated spam. If your mom unwittingly uses the machine
of
an ISP that also has a customer on it who sends spam, then that system's
address is blacklisted, right along with all the otherwise nice and friendly
town folk's outbound e-mail, including your mom's. Worse,
it may be a clever digital tracks-concealing spammer who is not even
a customer of that
ISP. It's the equivalent of torching the entire digital village
to win the war.

And if the
hapless ISP doesn't don a Net vigilante deputy badge and swear
an allegiance oath to the anti-spammers to immediately boot offending spammers
off his machine ranch, well then, by golly, that ISP is going to
be strung up feet first, too. You are either with us or agin' us,
pardner. At this rate, cyber boot hill is going to be filling up awfully
fast.

This range
of offensive-to-our-vigilante eyes-behavior also includes shutting off
otherwise honest SMTP (e-mail) anonymous
relay hosts, maybe one owned by
your business, whose masking features could be exploited by spammers
trying to hide their true identities. Your plea of “I didn't do
nuthin'!” is
the very thing that gets you hung. The list of Net treason crimes
goes on and on, which means sooner or later, almost anyone can get trapped
in this Net vigilante
tar pit, like Yahoo.
So now, in
addition to having to download my daily antivirus update, along
with my almost daily download of yet another Microsoft security patch, I have
to be sure to
e-mail duck and cover when these so called white hats come thundering
into my ISP's town.

If only that
was the end of it. The Net is turning out to be the ultimate way to peep
into your private life. Do you have a personal video
recorder plugged
into a phone jack or a broadband connection? Then don't be surprised
if every coach potato channel click you make isn't
being surreptitiously recorded on some far off network server. All your viewing habits and other
personal information
may be being sold off at a profit to a smarmy marketer who in turn is selling
your private life to an even slimier e-mail spammer, which in turn begets
the wrath of the Net vigilantes whose holy terror in turn comes crashing
down
on your e-mail head, thereby culminating one hugely vicious cycle.

Ahh, the Internet.
We hardly knew ye—before you turned around and
bit us in the ass.